Honorable Mention for Review Writing
This is a scale model of the Arc de Triomphe that I built. Photo by Sam Cushman
Minecraft is one of the greatest games ever created, especially if you like to build and create. It’s just like Legos for the computer except you are actually inside the world as a person. The world of Minecraft is a place where everything is made of blocks, each one cubic meter in size, and the only limit to what you can create with them is your imagination. You can go wherever you want to, climb mountains and hills, swim across massive oceans, explore underground caverns and build anything you put your mind to.
Minecraft is a game written in Java code (so the graphics are pretty basic, but that doesn’t really matter for gameplay) and created by a guy called Notch (a.k.a. Markus Persson). The world is made up of blocks of all kinds of materials that range from stone to glass, sand to obsidian, wood to brick, and water to lava.
In the game the goal is to mine and craft (hence the name Minecraft) materials to build with. You craft tools such as shovels and a picks and with them you can dig into the ground and mine your materials. Minecraft also has farming, fishing, and animal husbandry features. You can farm sugar cane, with which you can get paper to make books, and books can be used to make decorative bookshelves for the house or shelter you live in. Sugar can also be used to bake cakes and cookies. You can also farm wheat, from which you can make flour, which of course is used to bake bread. As far as animal husbandry goes, Minecraft has sheep, pigs, and cows which will give you wool, pork, and beef respectively. The pigs and cows can be harvested for leather as well which is another type of crafting material.
Minecraft also features monsters such as Zombies, Endermen, Skeletons, and Spiders each of which come out at night and can harm your character (so it’s a good idea to build your shelter as soon as possible). Zombies are pretty self explanatory, they moan and groan and attack you on sight. The skeletons carry bows and fire arrows at you from a distance. Spiders are like the Zombies but can climb objects to attack you. The Endermen are tall, dark creatures with tentacle-like arms. And if any of you people are familiar with the creepypasta character known as Slenderman, you will easily recognize the Endermen as a tribute to the Slenderman. Another more notorious monster is the Creeper, which comes out during the day to harass you. The Creepers will sneak up behind you and hiss, and then quickly run off, and if you aggravate them, they’ll blow themselves up and ruin anything you might be building. With all these monsters, it’s important that you make yourself a sword and forge yourself some armor to protect yourself with and to fight them all off.
As far as what you can build on Minecraft, the sky is the limit, literally as you can only build a couple of blocks past the clouds. But you can always find really neat projects on the internet and on YouTube, one of which was a 1:1 scale model of the Starship Enterprise for all you Trekkies out there. Another project might be building your roller-coaster, and yes you can ride them because Minecraft has rails and minecarts. Each server hosts their own amazing creations and different types of features and plug-ins. For fans of Zelda and Lord of the Rings, there have been servers made to be exact recreations of Hyrule and Middle Earth, with both the Temple of Time and the entire city of Minas Tirith featured on them. I’ve also seen entire recreations of Hogwarts castle from Harry Potter. I play on a server made by my brother-in-law. The server’s name is Watercraft. On it we have really neat plug-ins such as our own micro-economy, where players can trade goods they mine or craft and they can also sell and buy them for money. As far as our creations go, we have several epic castles, a massive pyramid that’s so big it takes a while to load correctly on your screen, a plethora of villages created by our wonderful and dedicated players, and several sky-scrapers. We also have a mall and a much smaller marketplace. I’m in the middle of making a southern plantation style home. I’ve always loved southern neo-classical architecture and Minecraft allows me to build my own plantation, and I can even raise and harvest crops because of the farming feature. For all you Skyrim fans out there, a group of players just recently finished building a model of the Dawnstar Dark Brotherhood Sanctuary, it’s really epic, too, and the list goes on and on. Like I said, on Minecraft your imagination is the only limit to what you can create.
For those wishing to play, they can purchase the game for a onetime payment of $26.95, a small price to pay given all that you can do with the game. It can be purchased at http://www.minecraft.net and people can register and start playing right away. You can play on any server you choose but I encourage you to hop around and find one that you really like with other great players that you’ll soon become good friends with. If any of you guys want to check out the server I play on, just download the game and when the window pops up, click on multiplayer, go to “add server” and type in “watercraft.dyndns.org” and click “join server.” Feel free to also check out our forum at http://www.watercraft.webatu.com. If you don’t feel up to online multiplayer, the game also features single player where you can have the entire world to yourself, but anything you create won’t be seen by other people, which is one of the perks of playing online.
Minecraft is by far one of the greatest games I have ever played and in it I can freely exercise my creativity to build anything that I put my mind to. I have had so much fun playing and the people I play with just make it all even better. So far Minecraft has almost 22 million registered users and I encourage all of you to add yourselves to that rapidly growing number.
Samuel Cushman 